Britain’s Suicidal Self-Delusion

More evidence that Britain has decided to embrace its cultural suicide comes from The Telegraph, which reports that the British High Commission pressured Kenyan authorities to release Michael Adebolajo, the murderer of Drummer Lee Rigby in London last week, after Kenyan police had arrested Adebolajo in 2010 when Adebolajo was attempting to make his way to Somalia for terrorist training:

A Kenyan lawyer who represented the 28 year-old suspected of hacking a Drummer Lee Rigby to death in London last week said his client was freed from arrest in the town of Lamu, Kenya, three years ago on the recommendation of the British High Commission.

Wycliffe Makasembo said: “Our own intelligence in Kenya were reluctant to release him, but it is the British High Commission which recommended that the suspect be released. It is the British themselves who defended him from our law enforcers.”

And today The Telegraphreports that Adebolajo attempted to travel to Somalia again last year. Here’s a suggestion: when someone wants to travel to Somalia, let him go there, but don’t let him come back.

It turns out that the British aren’t the only ones asleep at the switch. The French copycat stabber was known to French intelligence, too, but nothing was done.

Instead of waking up to the peril in their midst, British authorities are . . . cracking down on public critics of radical Islam in Britain, as Bruce Bawer reports:

[P]eople around the United Kingdom had been exercising what they thought was their right to free speech by posting on Facebook and other social media comments that were critical of Islam. Period. And the British government – this is by far the most important part – was treating these speech acts as crimes. . .

As of last Friday, according to the Mail, eleven persons had been picked up for anti-Muslim speech crimes. Among them were two Bristol men, aged 22 and 23, who had posted tweets “of an allegedly racist or anti-religious nature” and who had been taken into custody “under the Public Order Act on suspicion of inciting racial or religious hatred.” The Mail quoted a detective inspector as saying that the men’s tweets, which had been “directed against a section of our community,” were “completely unacceptable,” as they “cause…harm to our community.” The cop warned: “People should stop and think about what they say on social media before making statements as the consequences could be serious.” . . .

Are you old enough to remember the world before, say, the Satanic Verses fatwa? If so, can you imagine British police officials, way back then, ever making statements of the kind made in the past few days by those cops in Bristol and Surrey – statements warning that individuals making comments that cause “harm” or “distress” to Muslims will be subject to arrest and punishment? Such a thing would have been inconceivable in Churchill’s Britain, or Thatcher’s. The grim fact, alas, is that if the Rigby murder and its aftermath demonstrate anything, it’s that Islam is still very much on the march in Britain – and free speech increasingly in retreat.

Funny how that same injunction doesn’t seem to apply to people preaching jihad in Islamic communities.

The time has come to update Malcolm Muggeridge’s classic essay on “The Great Liberal Death Wish,” with Islam replacing Soviet Communism as the object of liberal prostration:

How otherwise could you explain how people, in their own country ardent for equality, bitter opponents of capital punishment and all for more humane treatment of people in prison, supporters, in fact, of every good cause, should in the USSR prostrate themselves before a regime ruled over brutally and oppressively and arbitrarily by a privileged party oligarchy? I still ponder over the mystery of how men displaying critical intelligence in other fields could be so astonishingly deluded.